While Still We Live: Facets of Freedom

Yesterday’s Inde­pen­dence Day cel­e­bra­tions here in the United States have me think­ing about free­dom and its many forms. In that con­text I can’t help but think of one of my favorite books, While Still We Live, writ­ten by Helen MacInnes. The phrase is taken from the first lines of the national anthem of Poland. I recently loaned the book out, so I don’t have it in front of me as I write this, and I can see from var­i­ous Eng­lish trans­la­tions online that the exact words vary from one to another, but my mem­ory of the full sen­tence as quoted in the book is “Poland has not yet per­ished, while still we live.”

Although I have always respected the author’s pen­chant for detailed research, I used to won­der whether her fic­tional account of the highly orga­nized Pol­ish resis­tance was true or exag­ger­ated. I won­der no longer. I recently read another book on the Pol­ish resis­tance, this one a work of cre­ative non­fic­tion. The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ack­er­man, showed me that the resis­tance descrip­tion in While Still We Live was no exag­ger­a­tion and may have even been under­stated. I know from other read­ings that the under­ground schools and uni­ver­si­ties run by Pol­ish cit­i­zens dur­ing World War II are not the main story; they are an echo of the under­ground Polish-language schools that were oper­ated dur­ing a time when Poland was par­ti­tioned among other coun­tries and did not exist sep­a­rately. The Pol­ish peo­ple have gone to incred­i­ble and won­der­ful lengths over the cen­turies to hold onto their lan­guage, their iden­tity and as many lit­tle pieces of free­dom as possible.

Peru, the land of my birth, cel­e­brates its inde­pen­dence on July 28. Its national anthem is titled “Somos Libres” (“We Are Free”) and my rough Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the first few lines is “We are free, let us always be so. Let the sun darken its lights before we deny the solemn vow.…” Yet in many ways the indige­nous peo­ples of Peru and other Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries are still fight­ing what they con­sider to be a 500-year occu­pa­tion by the enemy.

I remem­ber sit­ting in a relative’s liv­ing room dur­ing the Soviet occu­pa­tion of Afghanistan, and watch­ing in shock as a news­pa­per reporter said it was “scary” that the free­dom fight­ers would rather die than sub­mit to the inva­sion. She was obvi­ously not pre­pared for that assign­ment, as she had for­got­ten our own country’s her­itage and its obses­sion with indi­vid­ual free­doms. The fact that those very free­dom fight­ers may turn out to be peo­ple who deny oth­ers their free­dom (and this can apply to any coun­try at some point in its his­tory) does not dimin­ish the value of free­dom itself. It does, how­ever, remind me of the respon­si­bil­ity we have to pass free­dom on.

This morn­ing in church I joined the rest of the con­gre­ga­tion in singing “Amer­ica the Beau­ti­ful.” Over the years I have begun to have seri­ous dif­fi­cul­ties with one verse. Some­thing to do with “…pil­grim feet whose stern impas­sioned stress a thor­ough­fare for free­dom beat across the wilder­ness.” Half the time I don’t sing it. I keep look­ing for another inter­pre­ta­tion, but all I can think of are the lives we walked over on that voy­age, for that “wilder­ness” was not uninhabited.

In my study I have a post­card bear­ing a pic­ture of a young man. His hair is long; part of it is pulled back into braids at the top, but most of it hangs loose. Around his neck he wears two types of crosses on a neck­lace of bone and beads. He wears hoop ear­rings. He has a blan­ket or shawl draped loosely around his shoul­ders, over a shirt or robe. To me he is beau­ti­ful, not so much for any spe­cial phys­i­cal attribute but because he looks so com­pletely him­self in that moment. He is Navajo, and the pho­to­graph printed on the post­card is the “before” pic­ture taken on his enroll­ment into an indus­trial school for Native Amer­i­can stu­dents. Before his hair­cut, before the ban­ning of his native dress, before, I imag­ine, the pro­hi­bi­tion against speak­ing his own lan­guage. I keep the pic­ture to remind myself of what we some­times do to the free­doms of oth­ers while try­ing to pro­tect our own.

Along with many oth­ers in this coun­try I can say that gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of my fam­ily has fought for its free­dom and the free­doms of oth­ers. But what I have to add is that the fight for free­dom is not con­fined to a mil­i­tary legacy. Those who con­tribute to bet­ter envi­ron­men­tal qual­ity, lit­er­acy lev­els, vot­ing rights edu­ca­tion, the fight against hunger, the safety of chil­dren, ade­quate med­ical care and sim­i­lar ele­ments of human soci­ety are adding to our free­doms in a fun­da­men­tal way. May we con­tinue to fight for these free­doms while still we live.